Protesting Immodesty and Immorality

THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY

On July 6, 1929, publication of "Conditions at the Pool." The New Yorker.

Mrs. Uhlein of the Orange County Afternoon Delphian Society, who "always stood up for liberality (I wouldn't miss the Nation if you paid me)" protests  the immodesty at the community swimming pool : "Mrs. Foster and I counted seven grown girls, about eighteen years old, that had on bathing suits that came down to here in front and with no backs at all."

"If the girls want to get so brown that they look like colored people, and then have to be sorry next fall when they wear evening dress, that's up to them. That's their own lookout. But they don't have to flaunt their bodies where boys of high-school age will see them and get wrong ideas of womanhood in their heads."

"Naturally I recognized some of the girls and knew them by name, so I called two of them over to my car and politely suggested that they might at least pin up the front of their suits . . . One of the girls . . . told me, well, she as much told me to go to 'H.' The other one said, "This is nineteen-twenty-nine, Mrs. Uhlein, don't forget that."
____

On July 6, 1946, publication of "Secret Meeting." The New Yorker. Hellbox. Selected Stories of John O'Hara. 

The Chairman of the School Board alls an emergency meeting: "We have a very nasty situation . . . where a member of our faculty is accused of two crimes . . . on Commencement Night, getting publicly intoxicated (and) two, forcing his attentions on a young female student while intoxicated on school property . . . Personally, what I would do with a drunken bum that goes around molesting our high school girls, I would hand him his hat and give him a good swift kick and see to it he never gets another job in the public school system in the whole United States."